UPCOMING EVENTS

If you have a new MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, then there’s a great new game for you to play. It’s a variation on Pong, the Atari classic from the 1970s.

But instead of controlling the location of your paddle with a joystick or a controller or a key on the keyboard, this game — called TouchBarPong — lets you slide your finger on the Touch Bar, the narrow display that sits just above the keyboard on the laptop.

You can really get into the game when you put it in full-screen mode, and you see your paddle move left and right on the display as you glide your finger on the Touch Bar. It’s not too easy — as the volley continues, the ball moves faster and faster. You hear a simple clicking sound when you or the computer opponent scores a point. The app only lets you move the paddle icon on the app region of the Touch Bar, which is to say not the whole thing, unfortunately.

Above: TouchBarPong on the Touch Bar.

Image Credit: Screenshot

The app lets you move your paddle with your mouse if you don’t want to use the Touch Bar. Which means that if your Mac doesn’t have a Touch Bar, you can still play TouchBarPong. Despite the game’s name.

TouchBarPong arrived this week not on the Mac App Store but on GitHub, alongside a few other Touch Bar apps, including Pac-Bar, an implementation of Pac Man.

German iOS developer Ferdinand Loesch developed TouchBarPong. Loesch built it to make use of the Touch Bar and become familiar with Apple’s Touch Bar application programming interfaces, he told VentureBeat in an email. He also built a tiny app that brings Santa and his sleigh to the Touch Bar. Now, he’s working on a game called Gravity Guy, which people will be able to play entirely on the Touch Bar, he wrote.